Optimal To-Do List Gamification for Long Term Planning

Optimal To-Do List Gamification for Long Term Planning

Optimal To-Do List Gamification for Long Term Planning

By Saksham Consul, Jugoslav Stojcheski, Valkyrie Felso, & Falk Lieder

Abstract

“Most people struggle with prioritizing work. While inexact heuristics have been developed over time, there is still no tractable principled algorithm for deciding which of the many possible tasks one should tackle in any given day, month, week, or year. Additionally, some people suffer from cognitive biases such as the present bias, leading to prioritization of their immediate experience over long-term consequences. The present bias manifests itself as procrastination and inefficient task prioritization. Our method utilizes optimal gamification to help people overcome these problems by incentivizing each task by a number of points that communicates how valuable it is in the long-run. Here, we extend the previous version of our optimal gamification method with additional functionalities for helping people decide which tasks should and should not be done when there is not enough time to do everything. To improve the efficiency and scalability of the to-do list solver, we designed a hierarchical procedure that tackles the problem from the top-level goals to fine-grained tasks. We test the accuracy of the proposed incentivized to-do list by comparing the performance of the strategy with the points computed exactly using Value Iteration for a variety of case studies. These case studies were specifically designed to cover the corner cases to get an accurate judge of performance. Our method yielded the exact same performance as the exact method for all case studies. To demonstrate its functionality, we released an API1that makes it easy to deploy our method in Web and app services. We assessed the scalability of our method by applying it to to-dolists with increasingly larger numbers of goals, sub-goals per goal, hierarchically nested levels of sub goals. We found that the method provided through our API is able to tackle fairly large to-do lists with 9 goals, having a total 576 tasks. This indicates that our method is suitable for real-world applications.”

Reference

Consul, S., Stojcheski, J., Felso, V., & Lieder, F. (2021, September 15). Optimal to-do list gamification for Long Term Planning. Retrieved February 02, 2022, from https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06505

Keywords

Optimal gamification, reward shaping, productivity, dynamic programming, to-do lists, decision-support, hierarchical planning; SMDPs, research